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Caroline Sharples, "The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History" (Yale UP, 2026)
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Caroline Sharples about her book titled the Long Death of Adolf Hitler, An Investigative History, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Now, obviously there have been lots of biographies of Hitler and they usually cover his death right as biographies do. I think it would be surprising, though, if we came across a biography that covered all the things about his life and covered his death as extensively as this book makes the case that we really need to. Because as much as our sort of secondary school textbooks have a definitive and this is when and how he died sort of story in them. As with many things in our secondary school history textbooks, once we really go into the details of what the sources are telling us, there's a lot more to the story, which is fascinating because we think we know what that story is and yet there's a story before his death that we're going to investigate. There's a story afterwards that goes way more decades than you might think. So clearly we have a lot to get into that I'm trying to avoid giving away at this point. But Caroline, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Oh, thank you so much for the invitation. Miranda, could you start us off by
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, as I mentioned, there's a lot of books about Hitler. Why did you decide to add to this?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Okay, so yes, I'm Caroline Sharples. I'm a senior lecturer in History at the University of Roehampton, which is in southwest London. And I work generally on post war memories of National Socialism and representations of the Holocaust. And I've always had a particular interest in war crimes trials and so sort of what happens to Holocaust perpetrators after 1945. And this particular book kind of almost evolved by accident in a sort of casual conversations with colleagues who stop me every now and then, say, oh, but what exactly happened to Hitler then? And I thought, well, okay, maybe I do need to try and write something. And it started off being, I suppose, a fairly straightforward idea that I would just research the final movements of Hitler, what actually happened. And then I just sort of getting down all these little rabbit holes in the research and sort of occurred to me that nobody's really thought about the, so what factor, you know, why does he continue to fascinate people? Why has there been so much chatter about what happened to him over these decades? And so what this book is doing is actually offering the very first cultural history lens to this topic. And I'm kind of repositioning it not just as a Berlin story or a German story, but actually a global narrative as we see audiences around the world having a really peculiar emotional attachment to the idea of Hitler meeting a fitting end and sort of navigating the reality of what actually happens in 1945. So, yeah, it essentially becomes, why do we care? Why do we talk about him so much? And what are the meanings that have been attached to his fate over the years?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, a whole bunch of interesting questions then for us to unpack, obviously in less detail than in the book, but we will do our best to kind of create an overview, at least to give some answer to those questions. And I think it's this sort of fitting end idea I want to pick up on first, because given the distance with which we have between us now and his death, I think it is really easy to forget that as much as kind of for us, it's not a spoiler at all.
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Right?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
He dies. We know that. Not shocking anyone there, but there was obviously a time where he was like massively in the news all the time in Germany, but as you said, in many other countries as well. And he wasn't dead. And so there was a, well, what will happen? Right? And that's obviously something we see in the media today all the time. And we don't usually think of Hitler in that context because for us he's been dead quite a long time. But if we can Go back in time to that moment before the end was known. What were the sorts of expectations and as you document in the book, very public discussions about what Hitler's death could be like.
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
This is a really fascinating issue, I think. So if we start with the origins of the Second World War, I think 1939 is quite a good starting point because obviously everybody's looking towards Germany at that point. And there is a lot of public chatter about Hitler potentially dying and people start to imagine his death partly in Allied propaganda. Anyway, what I argue in the book is that actually the death of Hitler is held up as almost like a war aim for the Allies. It's an invective to keep on fighting because every contribution, contribution you're making to the war effort, you're helping to, you know, knock another nail in his coffin. So there's lots of visual propaganda which shows him being sort of bruised and battered and fatally injured by the sheer weight of Allied military might. And I say all the civilians doing their bit for the war campaign. But there's also a lot of newspaper discourse around, okay, if, if he's going to die, what might his death look like? And a lot of people could think about him either falling in battle or perhaps falling victim to an assassin or potentially of course, being tried and executed at the end of the conflict. The idea of him taking his own life is not really touched upon during the war, which I think is quite interesting, obviously knowing what we know now. But there's definitely a lot of expectation that, you know, the end of the war, the end of Nazism, will only be brought about through the end of Hitler himself.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a really interesting linking happening there. And picking up on the point you mentioned around suicide not being kind of one of the options I suppose laid out. That seems like a sort of obvious reason that when that is then reported of this is how he does actually die. I can see why a lot of people would be like, eh, that seems odd, right, because it kind of wasn't in the consciousness as one of the options. But you discuss that there are a bunch of other reasons why audiences might have been primed to kind of be suspect, I suppose, or be suspicious of that announcement coming out. What were the other reasons?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Right. So there are, I think, valid reasons on both sides, like in Germany and outside of Germany. I mean fundamentally of course, we've had 12 years of the Nazi regime in power promulgating their propaganda. So there's a lot of suspicion around the Nazi myth making that could take place. The idea that he might meet a heroic death in battle is already a bit, you know, suspicious in some people's eyes. You know, this is what they would say. There's already been a lot of speculation about where is he by spring 1945? Because Hitler has disappeared from public life. You know, we think of Hitler in his heyday, you know, commanding those big rall at Nuremberg or being always in the newsreel, attending events or giving those fiery speeches. But as the war goes on, as it starts to go badly for Germany, he seems to retreat from public life. We're not seeing him as often. And that creates a really interesting gap that people are thinking, well, what's become of him? Why isn't he there? Why isn't he sort of trying to do his best to rally German morale? It seemed really odd. As to what we're having in the 1940s is a lot of speculation. Where is he? Is he ill? Has he been incapacitated? Has there been some kind of secret internal coup that has wrestled him from power? Is he dying? Is he already dead? There's all these premature death rumors actually circulating, particularly 43, 44. So by the time we get to spring 1945, and we suddenly get the announcement that he had died, there is a moment where I think a lot of people are thinking, are we sure? You know, we haven't seen this? How do we know? So there's a lot of disinformation, and the cause and potential timing of when he dies just becomes that little bit more fluid, I think, in the public imagination.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's, of course, another aspect that we forget now, being so far, you know, to us, it's much more definitive than clearly it was in that context. But there's sort of phases there, right? There's the sort of initial report that comes out, and it's like, do we really trust this? Okay, now we're getting some more details. This seems more sort of legit. And there is, of course, a point where it's like, okay, this seems pretty definite that this happens. Then there's the question of, like, well, how do we respond to this? Right. It wasn't on people's radar before as a potential outcome, his death was linked to kind of victory in the war. Like, how does it work? For example, if you're sort of an everyday German, you've been following the news reports, you've gotten to the point where it's like, yeah, we do all pretty much accept now that he's died. And how do you respond to that?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
How Germans respond is actually a really intriguing question and a challenge, I think, for historians, because you've got to try and piece together those kind of emotional reactions from quite fragmentary sources, because there's no sort of formal institution running around collecting opinion poll data. And obviously we've got imminent total defeat and regime change. So suddenly, with Allied forces on the ground or advancing, it's not going to be very politic, is it, to suddenly do big displays of emotion for the old leader and the fallen regime. So we have to kind of read between the lines a bit. There are Allied journalists on the spot, embedded with troops, and they're able to observe things. Sometimes they directly speak to ordinary Germans, sometimes they're just reporting on overheard conversations. We also have letters, diary entries from Germans produced at the time, which are quite useful. And sometimes they've written memoirs after the event. But essentially there is a range of reactions. I don't think it's enough to just say nobody mourned him, because there's been 12 years of this highly emotional regime. So you'd figure that if Hitler suddenly disappears, if ethic suddenly stops in spring 45, that's got to have some kind of reaction, hasn't it, in people's hearts and minds? So what I think, what I'm trying to argue in the book, you know, that there are layers of responses. There are phases, as you say, initially. There are often reports of people sort of taking in the news quietly. There's grim silence. They seem to be taking a moment for themselves. Maybe they shrug their shoulders. They've also, of course, got their own pressing needs at the moment. You know, a lot of them don't know where their loved ones are. They're contending, particularly with the advance of the Red Army. There's food and fuel and housing shortages. So they've got their own immediate worries. Maybe Hitler was not so uppermost in their mind. But there are also those who are immediately a bit skeptical, you know, particularly when the Nazi radio is trying to say, oh, he fell fighting to his last breath against the Soviets. And some think, well, did he? I think actually he might be a bit too cowardly to do that. There's also a sense of if once the idea that he has taken his life emerges, there's also a lot of anger and a sense of betrayal that, well, we did all this fighting for him and he's just abandoned us at the crucial moment. There are pockets of genuine grief that we can observe. But as I say, it's often a case of people trying to dial down the emotion. I think, particularly if they're in the presence of American or British troops. You know, they don't want to be seen as being too attached to the previous regime.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of those British or American troops, how did the Allies respond again?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Actually, it's kind of similar in the way that we have a range of responses. I think when the news first breaks there's moments of wild jubilation. I mean, down in Australia there's this anecdote of these coal miners who just suddenly down tools and head home for the day. It's like, yay, this moment we've been waiting, it's finally here. Likewise, reports of cheering around, you know, certain media offices as they hear the news and are translating it from the German radio. But for ordinary people, again, there's moments of well, at last or why has this taken so long? And then at the same time sort of realization that it hasn't quite lived up to the expectations that they'd built up during the war years. You know, they were promised, you know, this fitting end, this, you know, seeing Hitler being seen to, brought to justice. And of course he doesn't, he's taken his own life, nobody sees him die. And I think that starts to create a sense of dismay and disappointment but then also again, little kernel of doubt, you know, well, how do we know he's definitely dead? We haven't seen the body, we haven't seen him dragged away for instance, and executed. So the again the idea of some suspicion starts to sink in. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EB GLISS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, and I mean, that makes sense why there would then be investigations about, you know, making sure that those kinds of questions can be answered. So can you tell us about what those investigations, I mean, who was investigating? How did they go about it? What did they come up with?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Yeah, absolutely. And I say it does all tie together because in the spring and summer of 1945, those little doubts start to turn into rumors. You know, people claiming they've actually seen Hitler alive and well in different parts of Germany. He's hiding in the woods in Heidelberg, or he's boarded the yacht out of Hamburg and is sailing around the coast. And there's all this sort of weird speculation. And the Allies, of course, want to move very quickly to stamp that. That sort of stuff out because the idea of a living Hitler is still quite dangerous. It could feed into a. A Nazi revival. You know, they want to get rid of that ideology, totally denazify German society. So this encourages them to set about a more formal investigation into his whereabouts. And for the Western Allies, it's a case of trying to get their hands on as many witnesses as they can. People who saw him in his final days, people who worked within the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin, people who might be able to testify to his intent and to his state of mind and his physical health and anything they might know about his demise. And this formulates in. Formalizes. Sorry, in. In September 1945, British Military Intelligence launch an inquiry into Hitler's whereabouts. And this is what they're doing. They're searching for witnesses like Hitler's former secretarial staff and people like that. And by the 1st of November, 1945, so you can see it's quite a short inquiry by perhaps modern standards. But first November, you have them formally announcing their findings. And they've concluded that on the base of all the testimonial evidence that they've come, they've come to receive that Hitler took his own life and he shot himself in the head. You know, we've had witnesses talking about the suicidal gloom that has fallen over the bunker. They've talked about him debating the merits of ingesting cyanide over shooting himself. We know There were pistols found at the scene. So these are all the little things that add up for the British to say. He shot himself on the 30th of April 1945.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's definitely a kind of multi step process. Then going on, thinking then about kind of the other things that happen when sort of anyone dies really.
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
One question is sort of when, one question is how? And one question is then what right? Did Hitler leave a will?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
He did. He did. He dictated his political testament and personal will. So that's two documents. He dictates them in the final hours of his life. So he marries Eva Braun famously, and he dictates his will. And he is obviously partly doing this in the conventional sense to settle his estate. He leaves some personal effects to, to family and things like that. It's also a chance to leave his political legacy. And there are three copies of the Wheel that are created for different purposes and they're each dispatched with a different courier out of the bunker. And so we're just imagining this scene in Berlin. Three men set out, they've each got a copy of the document. They're heading eventually to different parts of Germany. So one is supposed to be traveling north to Schleswig Holstein and delivering a copy to Grand Admiral Karl Joel. And that's because he's been named as Hitler's political successor. He's the new President of the Reich. So it makes sense, doesn't it, for him to have a document where Hitler basically outlines the new power hierarchy. It's going to affirm his power. Likewise, there's a copy heading towards Schorner, who's next, the new commander of the armed forces. At this point he's embattled around Prague, he's still fighting. So again it makes him to have a copy to know the chain of command. And the other copy, third one perhaps most interestingly, is heading south towards Munich, towards the Nazi party archives. And that's the idea of this is Hitler's message for posterity, I think, writing himself firmly into the history of the movement. Now, somewhat hilariously, none of these men actually really managed to get out of Berlin properly. You know, all sorts of things are happening. Imagine the Soviets are encircling the city, there's bombing, there's, you know, all sorts of things they've got to try and navigate. One of them at one point falls into a river and eventually they decide that this, this journey is too hazardous. There's no way we're going to get to our intended destinations. So the couriers peel off and as you might imagine anyone might do having been engaged in this conflict for this time, it's almost coe to Rennes. They decide to head home essentially and they go. So they retreat to where they feel most comfortable. And the copies of the wheel that we now have are actually discovered quite by accident really. One of the couriers, Heinz Lorentz, is captured by the British in their occupation zone. And this is towards the end of 1945. So quite a timeline lag I suppose between the moment of Hitler's death in April and then the discovery of these documents towards the end of the year. And when Lorenz is arrested, they're doing sort of security searches and they notice that his coat seems suspiciously bulky. And what he's done is rather than destroy this testament, you can't deliver it, but rather than destroy it, he's had it sewn into the lining of his coat pocket lining of his coat. And so when that's discovered there's a lot of excitement as you can imagine, because you know, the, the people recognize this looks official, this looks like Hitler's signature and so they quickly get translating it and figure out this is his will. And under interrogation Lorenz then let slip that, well, there are actually two other couriers and two other copies. And so the search is on. And so November, December, literally into the turn of the year, New Year 1946, we're looking for the other copies, the British and the Americans. And by January we have got all three recovered. And again, it's all in quite pathetic circumstances. One of them had hidden his copy in a trunk, just keeping it safe. Amongst other effects. Another one had buried it in a bottle in his parents back garden. And again, this is winter, so they've got to literally chip through the ice and stuff to try and excavate this. But they recover the documents and then that just creates a follow up conversation among the Allies about well, what do you do with this now? Because there's this danger they feel that if people hear Hitler's last words it might again spark a kind of Nazi spirit. It might revive that ideology, it might revive Nazi sympathizers. It's, it's felt, it's like it's a dangerous document. You know, it has the seeds to so martyrdom, legends or just infect the living. That's the way they kind of think of it, has to be contained and we get a lot of behind the scenes debate. So do we just suppress it, do we destroy it, do we archive it, do we publish it with a debunking commentary? You know, these Days we talk about fact checking it, wouldn't we? All these different ideas, but it does. The news of these discoveries inevitably does get out. And so somewhat resigned to the fact they admit the discoveries and the newspapers reprint the test, reprint the word of the Testament in their pages. But in reality, the media kind of do the debunking job anyway for the Allies, because a lot of people are just immediately fixated on the fact that a Hitler's signature at the bottom of the document looks really kind of pitiful. It's scratchy, tiny little thing. He looks quite fragile. You can imagine this as someone really sort of frail, desperate, you know, not strongly. That's quite a scribbled little signature. And the other thing is the idea that he just seems to be ranting and raving to the bitter end. So the idea that he just seems to be unhinged, bitter, alone, abandoned by his comrades. And I think there's a sort of grim satisfaction in that, you know. So we could look at his testament and we say, well, look, it shows that he intended to die. He states very clearly in this Testament, I'm going to take my life. But at the same time, you can sort of mock him a bit for the sense of the sort of the pathetic circumstances in which he did meet his end.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I have to admit, this might have been the most, to me, cinematic aspect of the history you've written of what happens to the couriers, the falling in the river, the getting captured. What's going on with your coat?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's just so many details here that are absolutely in the category of real life is stranger than fiction. So thank you for taking us down that bit that might seem like a rabbit hole. But as you've demonstrated, there was a lot of concern about these words and kind of people really did pore over them and kind of make judgments from it. So that helps us understand kind of one of the things that happens after he is dead. And if we cover kind of the checklist of things, right, there's the when did he die? All right, we've looked at that. How did he have a will? What was in it? What happened to it? Great. We've got all those things sort of checked off that would be applicable for kind of anyone dying. The obvious sort of next one is like, great, everything seems to be in order now. This person is legally declared dead and therefore, you know, all the other processes can flow from that. Was he at this point, with the will then declared legally dead?
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Dr. Caroline Sharples
Ah, no. Why not? The death drags on. Yes. So this is a sort of a weird kind of legal quirk which I hadn't actually really considered until I set out on this project. Yes, Hitler leaves, writes his will, and in his personal will in particular, he has outlined various little personal effects, like his old army paybook and things like that, which he wants to leave to his sister. And as we move into the early, late 40s, early 1950s, his sister Paula is trying to claim this stuff. But as with any estate, you know, there are certain legal things that need to be in place. One thing that wasn't in place for Hitler was a death certificate. And at one hand. So you might think, well, you know, everybody's declared him dead, isn't that enough? And apparently not. But nobody had thought to actually register him as being dead, perhaps unsurprisingly, given all the chaos in post war Berlin. So what we actually get in the early 50s is a district court in Berchtesgaden down in southern Germany, staging a set of hearings to determine whether there is yet enough evidence, enough grounds to declare him legally dead. And part of this, again, is the fact that we never saw a body publicly. We've only got the word of those witnesses and indeed the statement in Hitler's testament that he was going to end his own life. So is it now a moment to just double check all that evidence? That's what the judge basically sets out to do. And he quickly tries to gather as many witnesses as he can. And at this point, there's a load of German prisoners of war who've been held in Moscow since 1945, and they include some former members of Hitler's most intimate staff. His former valet, for instance. And in 1955, Moscow, after some new diplomatic overtures from the West German Chancellor, Konrad Anna, Moscow finally released those German prisoners of war. So as they returned to West Germany, they're suddenly now available to be questioned by the Berchtesgaden court and indeed later historians. And they are asked about what they know, what do they see in the bunker? And we start to get more and more detail about his final hours, about him repeatedly saying he was going to end his own life. There are reports of hearing of the gunshot. And also these are people who helped take his body afterwards out into the gardens of the Reich Chancellery and set it on fire. Because Hitler told them very clearly he didn't want his body to fall into enemy hands. He didn't want his remains to be paraded posthumously or publicly humiliated, as you see, for instance, with Benito Mussolini also in spring 45. So all of a sudden, then mid-1950s, Hitler's death is very much in the news again. These new witnesses coming forward, telling their stories, new little bits of evidence adding to the story, and collectively it is agreed that it is enough to say, yes, he's definitely dead. Yes, there are legal grounds for confirming this. So it's December 1956, 11 years after the actual suicide, that a death certificate is finally issued, and they pin it up on a public notice board. You know, the announcement that, you know, he is now legally definitely dead.
- [28:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a pretty big gap there. But Cold War politics came up for a moment, and the idea of kind of what happens to his corpse, I think, is an interesting one thread to pull for a second. So can you tell us more about kind of how the Cold War plays into this even beyond the 1950s?
- [28:46]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
I can, but let's rewind a little bit, because when you asked me earlier about what the Allies knew, what they're investigating, I gave you the Western narrative, or what I would also call the public narrative, what everybody at the time was hearing. But if we think about how the war ends and where the Allies converge on Germany, it's the Soviets who get to Berlin first. It's the Soviets who get to the Reich Chancellery and the Fuhrer Bunker site where Hitler died. So that means they get first dibs on any surviving witnesses that are in the vicinity. They get the first chance to search the scene. And what we quickly discover is now is that they weren't always very honest and open with their Western allies as to what, if anything, they were uncovering. So at the time, they were telling the west, no, we don't know anything more than you do. We haven't found anything. We're searching high and low. There's no sign of him. But with the end of the Cold War, we have the opening up of the former Soviet archives. We're gradually getting documents made available and translated. And now we're at the vantage point where we could start to actually align Soviet sources from the same period with those Western ones. And it emerges that actually, fairly soon, early days of May 1945, they recover the charred remains of a man and a woman from the Reich Chancellery gardens, and they send them for an autopsy at a field headquarters. And very quickly, they are confidently writing their reports that they have found the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. But they don't tell the west this. And it's not until the 1960s that this alleged autopsy report is published in English, published in the west, and at the time, it's not actually taken that seriously because as set of kind of Cold War politics and rivalries, the book that it is published in is very propagandistic. It's a very celebratory narrative of the Soviet war effort. And so the tone kind of puts the backs up of Western reviewers, Western historians, they think, oh, this isn't, this isn't a serious piece of work. If it is true that they recovered a body, why didn't they tell us? Why all these years of silence, which is actually a pertinent question. And we could speculate about the sort of Stalin's paranoia, his sort of political interference that he's running, sort of disrupting relations in the west, but definitely there's a lot of mutual mistrust. And what this means then is that the search for evidence does become this decades long process. And when we get to the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, not only do we have the opening up of archives, we get more document evidence, but we start to have limited access to Hitler's dental remains that have been housed in this Moscow archive for all of this time. So it's really interesting that as the political climate thaws, we start to get more evidence emerging and just obviously reaffirming what we have hopefully understood all along is that Hitler is dead, he did take his own life.
- [32:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect that kind of. This goes so many more decades after. I at least kind of expected it to. Can we stay on the dental bit for a moment though? Because there's some kind of interesting details. Like it's one thing to have access to it, but what are you sort of checking those records against? That's another sort of separated by the Cold War element, isn't it?
- [32:20]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
It is, yes. So again, just think about just very simply, the Soviets have like the physical objects, they extract the dental remains when they're autopsying this corpse and they immediately set out to try and verify that it is Hitler's body. And they capture his former dental nurse and his dental technician who were in Berlin still, and they asked them to describe Hitler's dental history. And Hitler had really bad teeth. You know, that's one of the things that emerges from this and there's a lot of quite squeamish detail about how bad his teeth were. So he'd had extensive bridge work done and they remember intimately, partly because of the complex nature of some of these procedures, but also of course, the infamous nature of their client. I suppose it's going to stick in your mind, and they're able to describe his treatment. It all maps onto sort of the physical objects that the Soviets are holding. And then of course, they present them with the actual remains and they say, yes, that's him. So we have their testimony. The west, meanwhile, without the physical objects, are nonetheless trying to gather as much biomedical testimonial evidence or other files that they can. So if they were to recover a body, they would have the means by which to identify it. And so they have another of. They have Hitler's main dentist, they have some of his former doctors, and collectively they are all asked to describe, describe his medical history and his dental history. So we have that, we have X rays. When Hitler was caught up in the bomb plot in 1944, the July bomb plot by Stauffenberg, we know that he suffered sort of superficial scarring and there was some sort of problem with his ear and he had his head X rayed at that time. And those slides have been preserved so you could potentially map on the X rays the descriptions of his dental treatment. And these little things, again, they just all add up. And it was in the 1970s. There's a couple of Norwegian scientists who, to painstakingly align all of these different pieces of evidence and almost like cross check everyone, like creating almost like a grid. You know, this is what we know for every single tooth in his head, whether it's his natural tooth, whether it's a denture or whatever. And the consistency across all of this is really significant. And for those who've actually managed to go and look at things firsthand, French scientists in 2018, for instance, they were able to obviously look at it, look at it under a microscope. They can detect the wear and tear of these, of these remains. They're sort of looking at the discoloration. And again, there's little things, you know, that it seems to be absolutely from the period of 1940s, there seems to be evidence that the person had a vegetarian diet, something else that we know that Hitler had. So it just all comes together in quite a convincing way to say, yep, those are his teeth, this is him.
- [35:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We all know obviously, as historians that there can be all sorts of historical questions that are intensely of interest to small groups of us, but kind of don't hit the mainstream. So there could be a world in which, you know, it's a bunch of dental historians going about and doing all this sort of stuff. And obviously, as you've detailed it is. But they are doing this because anything that kind of comes up, or at least Partially because anything that they come up with does get newspaper headlines. So to kind of go back to one of the initial questions you posed at the beginning of this, like, why do we care so much? Like, why are we bothered about the dental investigations decades later?
- [36:09]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
Well, it goes back to again, that. That manner in which Hitler died, you know, nobody saw him die. Now, that's quite unique in the history of 20th century dictators. You know, you think about other people who either die whilst in power, so it could be like Stalin or whatever, and they could have state funerals and displays of mourning and people know that he's gone. Or people might have been arrested at the end of a conflict, tried executed again, thinking about Mussolini, or later, more recently, people like Saddam Hussein again, you see them die. But Hitler just manages to avoid all of that by taking his own life underground, leaving those instructions for his body to be cremated. So I think there's just always this concern that we have to prove it and we want to find more proof and make it absolutely, you know, in controversial, introvertible. So latching on to any sort of new witness, testimonial, any slight evidential discovery in terms of biomedical analysis. Yeah, it's. It's so important. And there's a film critic in 2004, when Downfall, the film came out, who made this comment that every few years, you know, we have to basically hold this dictator up again and just check that he's still dead. Obviously metaphorically, but it's. It just seems to me that that's the thing, isn't it? We just want to keep making sure. And I think people are just fascinated by it partly because of this. The search for the evidence is itself such an engaging story. You know, all of these sort of intelligence rivalries and the access to some sort of shadowy archives. It's all quite a gripping detective tale on its own, but a sense, I think, that people want something to bring closure. You know, Hitler again managed to escape death, so we just kind of want to make sure that we kind of again prove that he's gone and also just reinforce, you know, the circumstances in which he died. You know, he doesn't go out with a great big bang or any sort of heroic deed, but, you know, he's there pretty much on his own in his underground, very cramped bunker in a very desperate state of mind.
- [38:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Coming then, to the end of our discussion about the book, I've mentioned a few places where kind of the details are just wild to read about. Are there any sort of details or aspects that you found especially surprising or that you kind of keep stuck in your mind after all of this research and writing that you want to throw in at the end.
- [38:40]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
For me, I think the most interesting, engaging part of the writing was actually in the first couple of chapters as it ends up in the book. Thinking about the pre1945discourse around his demise or what it might look like, and the idea that during the Second World War, across Allied nations, the idea of Hitler's death essentially becomes public entertainment. There was so many interesting wartime jokes being created and circulating which all sort of imagine his demise one way or another, or there are games and songs and even fundraising activities. And I think that was one thing that's also really stuck in my mind is that when the Allies are trying to raise money for a new warship or to support the Royal Air Force, things like that, you could obviously just stand on the street corner, perhaps with your collecting tin and like any sort of ordinary charitable endeavor, but in several places. And again, it's not just in the uk, but we see it in Canada, in the United States, in New Zealand, these efforts to kind of create a mock funeral for the Fuhrer, having a box or sometimes an actual coffin, and it's being paraded through the streets and it's all been sort of celebrated. This is Hitler's coffin. And if when people donate money to the cause, they mark the donation by driving a literal nail into this coffin. And I just thought, that is so amazing. And now I found at least a couple of photographs of these activities. So one of them made it into the book. And I just think the idea that people are imagining him, but also really imagining themselves contributing to his death, that's what really struck with me.
- [40:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a thing designed to stick in people's memories. And clearly it has done so. Yeah, I think that's a very good place to end the discussion on the book that barrymotch is taking sort of kind of, what is the cultural impact of all of this? So what, may I ask, are you working on now that this book is off your desk? Whether or not it's related, whether or not it's a book. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [40:54]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
I can. I am still. You probably think I'm somewhat obsessed with. With death and. And dead Nazis in particular. But my other project, it's. Again, it's. It's been mumbling on in the background for a little while, but I really want to get on and sort of write the next book, which is More about Holocaust perpetrators, many of them who are put on trial as war criminals after 1945. Significant number of them are executed, and these include concentration camp guards or people involved in mass shootings. All different elements of the Holocaust. And that's often sort of treated as, again, bit like death of Hitler, treated like an end point. You know, that's it, they're gone. But in reality, this is a bit of a spoiler then the way in which those executed corpses are handled vary between the different occupation zones in Germany. You know, what the British do with the remains is very different from what the Americans do, for instance. And so what the book is doing is tracing how they are disposed of. There are secret burials, there are cremation, some bodies returned to relatives for quiet burial. Then there are later reburials. And it becomes a very interesting case of basically, what do you do with a dead Nazi? Because again, a bit like Hitler, it shows the power of what we might call the difficult dead. In this case, the war criminal corps has this power to kind of disrupt the social and political fabric and pose challenges for the living. You know, their graves could be pilgrimage sites for Nazi enthusiasts. They become sites of political rallies. So how do we shut that down? So, yeah, it's tracing the post execution history of Holocaust perpetrators.
- [42:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing for many of the same reasons. I think that the book we've been discussing is interesting. So anyone who wants to learn more can of course read that book titled the Long Death of Adolf Hitler, An Investigative History, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Caroline, thank you so much for speaking with me on the podcast.
- [43:01]
Dr. Caroline Sharples
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure,
- [43:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sam.